This yeast, which threatens people with weak immune systems, is resistant to antifungals. The United States is sounding the alarm.
The United States is concerned about a “threat” to public health. In a recent press release, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the US federal agency in charge of health – evokes a spread at “an alarming rate” of a fungus in US health establishments.
This mushroom is White ears, a species of yeast – that is, a single-celled fungus – already known for several years. Its particularity: it is particularly persistent on surfaces – whether medical equipment, the floor, bedposts or sheets – but also resistant to disinfection or antifungal products.
A New York hospital even had to rip off part of the floor of a patient’s room after he died to get rid of the fungus, reported franceinfo, citing an article from New York Times. In this regard, the CDC is also concerned about the tripling, in 2021, of the number of cases resistant to the antifungal drugs recommended for the treatment of infections. White ears.
A risk for immunocompromised people
First described in 2009 in Japan, this yeast has since been observed on five continents. Whether White ears poses no risk to healthy people, it can be fatal for those with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly or heavily hospitalized patients.
Particularly serious infections which are also on the increase: the CDC thus ensures that between 2019 and 2021, the number of infections has tripled across the Atlantic, going from 476 to 1,471 cases.
If this fungus enters the bloodstream of these immunocompromised people – via a catheter or a wound, which explains its proliferation in hospital settings – the infection becomes massive and reaches the nervous system, bones and organs.
“If you are in intensive care and you have candidemia, you have a one in two chance of dying within thirty days”, noticed for franceinfo Stéphane Bretagne, Deputy Director of the National Reference Center for Invasive and Antifungal Mycoses at the Pasteur Institute.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the mortality rate reaches 29% to 53% of cases. The WHO thus classifies it among the 19 priority fungal pathogens.
“It’s not a killer fungus”
On the European continent, between 2019 and 2021, some 327 patients were affected in five countries including France, believes Eurosurveillance, the European journal dedicated to the surveillance, epidemiology, prevention and control of infectious diseases.
In France, only six cases have been identified. But this fungus worries because of its high lethality, points out the High Council for Public Health, “essentially attributable to the numerous comorbidities observed in infected or colonized patients”. As a reminder, between 200,000 and 300,000 people are immunocompromised in the country.
But Stéphane Bretagne, also head of the parasitology-mycology department at Saint Louis Hospital (AP-HP), wanted to be reassuring in an article by Science and future which dates from 2019, when White ears began to be touted as the “hospital killer fungus”.
“Humans, like most mammals, are naturally very resistant to fungi.” And added: “It’s not a killer fungus, we have to reassure the population.”